Gear & Gadgets —

Review: Acer’s Iconia W700 is an Ultrabook in a tablet’s body

The tablet balances size, performance, and battery life with some success.

Internals, performance, and battery life

The hardware on the inside of the W700 is very nearly identical to that in Acer's Aspire S7 Ultrabook series, with a couple of notable exceptions: our review unit included a dual-core 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U CPU, 4GB of non-upgradeable DDR3, Bluetooth 4.0, and a dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi chip courtesy of Atheros. The SSD is a 128GB model from Toshiba (model number THNSNS128GMCP) rather than the oddball no-name RAIDed model we found when we pried the S7 apart, which makes us a bit more confident in the drive's longevity, even if it brings disk performance down a bit.

Since it uses Ivy Bridge instead of ARM, performance is on par with just about every Ultrabook on the market today, and it's excellent for a tablet (though you really notice mostly in desktop apps and not in the ones downloaded from the Windows Store). The tablet's cold boot time is consistently about eight or nine seconds, which is excellent compared to iOS and Android tablets (though admittedly I find that I rarely shut my phones or tablets all the way down, even though I'm still in the habit of doing it for my laptop and desktop).

To put its performance in context compared to ARM devices (and to give some sort of rough preview of what we can expect from the Intel-powered Surface Pro whenever it comes out), we busted out our browser benchmarks and ran a few quick tests in Internet Explorer 10. While it doesn't run on Windows RT, we also got out the cross-platform Geekbench CPU benchmark to compare it to the fastest tablets from the iOS and Android ecosystems, just for the sake of comparison.

These numbers basically sum up the Intel-versus-ARM debate all by themselves: Intel's fastest silicon is massively faster than the best that ARM SoCs can offer, but ARM enables much thinner and lighter tablets than Ivy Bridge. With the next-generation Haswell architecture and its successors, Intel is hoping that it can reduce the power consumption of its CPUs more quickly than the ARM competitors can raise their performance. From this vantage point, we're not sure that either outcome is inevitable, but 2013 and 2014 should give us more definitive information about the way the winds are blowing.

Intel's Atom represents a sort of middle ground, for now—we don't have a current Clover Trail Atom tablet to throw into this mix, but its performance and power consumption should be in the same ballpark as ARM. In a Windows tablet, Atom is preferable to ARM simply because it can run Windows desktop apps in addition to Windows Store apps. However, this compatibility advantage doesn't extend to the ARM-optimized iOS and Android ecosystems, especially for companies like Apple and Samsung who typically roll their own SoCs without paying Intel for the privilege. Atom is useful as a stopgap solution, but everything we've seen indicates a desire on Intel's part to get architectures like Haswell and Broadwell into high-end tablets and leave Atom to drive its smartphones and low-end tablets.

Battery life

Finally, there's the matter of battery life—the Aspire S7's battery life was probably the worst thing about it, and since it and the W700 are so close on the inside we didn't expect much from its battery either. To our surprise, the W700 lasted just shy of six hours in general use with the screen brightness cranked—the same conditions killed the S7's battery in just three and a half hours. You're likely to get even better battery life if you leave the screen's automatic brightness sensor on or turn the brightness down—even if you don't get quite to iPad or Nexus 10 levels, you should be able to squeeze a whole work day out of this battery if you're careful.

It should also be noted that this real-world number is much better than the anemic 4.5 hours Microsoft promises with the Surface Pro. An Ivy Bridge tablet obviously doesn't need to have abysmal battery life, so it's a bit puzzling why the Surface Pro's is allegedly so bad.

Conclusions

Enlarge/ The W700 is a decent tablet, but it's a good bit thicker and heavier than something like an iPad.

Andrew Cunningham

The Iconia W700 (and, by extension, any tablet based on Ivy Bridge chips) is in a rough spot: its performance is the best thing about it, but the performance is tied directly to its size and weight, which in turn are probably the most bothersome things about the tablet. Stuffing an Ultrabook's performance into a tablet also makes a little less sense when the tablet's dock doesn't actually equip it to serve as an Ultrabook.

Even if you can overlook these flaws, it's a bit difficult to recommend the W700 right at this moment—Intel's CES press briefing gave us a glimpse at another Acer tablet that uses the new Y-series Ivy Bridge processors we've spent so much time talking about lately, and tablets based around those more power-efficient CPUs should be able to shrink in thickness and weight (and get better battery life) than tablets based on the U-series chips. That tablet is also pictured in a case with an integrated keyboard, which might make for a more laptop-like experience than the W700's case offers.

Enlarge/ Intel showed off another Acer tablet with the low-power Y-series Ivy Bridge CPUs at its CES press briefing, making the W700 a little harder to recommend.

Andrew Cunningham

Even with Y-series CPUs, Ivy Bridge Windows 8 tablets aren't going to fill the same niche as an iPad or Nexus 10; they're still larger and heavier, they still use (relatively) noisy fans, and while the Windows Store's app situation continues to improve, it's still not as entrenched as iOS or Android. Their biggest benefit is that they can also be used as full-on mouse-and-keyboard laptops when traveling, something that isn't true of the W700 and its odd dock.

As a demonstration that tablets can use Ultrabook-class processors and still get by as tablets, the W700 is a fine device. As something you should run right out and buy right now, it falls short—upcoming Ivy Bridge and Haswell look to address most of its faults, and based on what we've seen of Haswell so far they'll be as thin as these Ultrabooks-turned-tablets can get before Broadwell chips start coming out in 2014. Hold off on this one, but rest assured that these kinds of tablets don't have to sacrifice battery life for performance.